A little Sunday afternoon baking with the princess and the newborn....interesting

 I always like to bake on Sundays. Not sure why, but for some reason it just feels right. Some of my best creations have been birthed out of the stillness of a Sunday afternoon. Though, there's not much stillness anytime around here these days with an 18 month-old little diva running around the house and a 4 day old newborn laying around alternating between screaming, pooping, and sleeping all hours of the day and night...ya know, they just don't do a whole lot for a while! They kinda just lay there and poop a lot. But nobody ever cares. Everybody just keeps telling them how precious they are while wiping the poop off their armpits and toes...yeah, that's right, I said armpits and toes. If you've never experienced the complete and udder joy (haha, get it?) of having a child of your own, you might not believe that they can poop from head to toe, but believe me buddy, they can.

This picture below is of our oldest, and as you can see there was poop everywhere...she had a knack for storing it up for a couple of days and then hitting you with it all at once. It was scary...let me tell you!  As a Marine door gunner on a helicopter who fearlessly flew all over Iraq during our "not-a-war", this was scary. My wife is so brave though...she charged in without the slightest bit of hesitation, with nothing more than some wipey's.

So enough about poop, let's talk about cheesecake. As I mentioned, Sunday afternoons are always a great time to do some baking, and today was no different. I decided to make a cheesecake, so I asked the mom-in-law (totally not a nag, I'm such a lucky guy) what she thought sounded good and she shouted out "chocolate chip". So I got to work making a chocolate chip cheesecake, but while I was rummaging through the pantry the coconut caught my eye...so I threw half the bag of that in too.

If you're one of the faithful followers of my blog, then you will have rightfully assumed I used my 3-2-1 recipe 

to make my cheesecake. It's so simple and delicious why change it? Well, I mean, change it to make it into the flavor of the day, but why go through all the trouble of adding thirteen thousand ingredients to a cheesecake when just three gets the job done amazingly? However, I have to admit the supposed Cheesecake Factory recipe I made once was quite tasty. It had a fluffiness that mine seems to be lacking as I recall, but it's ingredient intensive! 

For today's recipe, I made my 3-2-1 recipe and added a cup of chocolate chips and a cup of coconut...oh man as I'm sitting here typing this it just dawned on me that I forgot to put in the tsp of vanilla that I usually add. Ooops. We shall see how it tastes. I'm sure it will be alright.

 I prepared it following the normal routine but this time I tried something different. I remembered a technique the lady at Bumdoodlers who made our wedding cake told me about. She said she preheats the oven to like 500 degrees, then throws in the cheesecake and immediately drops the temperature to 350. So, I gave it a shot. I preheated to 500, threw the cake in then turned the temperature knob to 350 for 30 minutes, then dropped it to 250 for the remaining 30 minutes. Once the hour was up, I turned the oven off but left the cake in there. After it had cooled for probably half an hour I opened the door on the oven and left it in there. I finally pulled the cake out and set it on the table about 2 hours or so after it was done baking. I also decided to throw in a casserole dish full of warm water on the rack below it as an attempt to keep it from cracking and collapsing.

And BAM, it worked! Still ugly, but gettin better!

The Never Before Revealed VAMPIRE BRITTNEY: The Birthin Part Two

Men, just bear with me for a moment, I'm going to relay some information that we men don't really care all that much about nor do we understand the importance that women place on it, but I do know it's important to them so, like I said, bear with me!
We arrived at the hospital shortly after 5:00pm on Wednesday, November 28, 2012 and Courtney Lynn McDaniel was officially born at 7:13 pm...yeah 2 hours. It was incredible. Brittney is a champ when we're holding out on her epidural, but that's not even the start of it.

This beautiful little girl weighed in at 6lbs, 11 oz and was 18 1/2 inches long. Labor began around 1:30, the contractions got strong around 4:00, and got really strong on the car-ride to the hospital, go figure. She was at a 6 sometime around 6:35 probably, started pushing around 7:00 and that baby popped out thirteen minutes later, they toweled her off real quick and threw her onto mamma's belly...and i'm not exaggerating here, they plopped her down like a piece of meat on a butcher block. They are all but gentle with a newborn baby, but I guess it's not that big a deal considering where the baby just came out of. That's not necessarily a gentle process in any stretch of the imagination. So like I said, they plopped her up on the tummy and continued to wipe and run around like maniacs...I don't know what the heck they were doing; I was a bit preoccupied staring at this precious little girl. She was just so sweet looking, sprawled out on her mamma's belly crying and flailing her arms about. Mamma was boo-hoo'ing over there...i think it was the endorphin's you hear about. Whatever it was she was just pouring out the tears and wailing uncontrollably...it was actually quite touching, almost brought a tear to my eye.  But I couldn't let Courtney's first image of her daddy be a sobbing idiot so I manned up and put on a smile. Then they gave me some scissors to cut the cord, I'm sure there's a picture somewhere but I don't know where. And then she was whisked away for all the crap they do over there in the corner of the room.  It was quite an event.  I have to admit I was completely overwhelmed and blown away by the whole thing, even though we just went through all of this 18 months ago with our first little angel.

The end!!!!



...I wish. It was supposed to be all over and everything was fine blah, blah, blah...but it wasn't all over. We didn't know it at the time, but it wasn't all over. There was bleeding we didn't know about. Hemorrhaging as they call it. I might normally use the term bleeding like a stuck pig, but I won't use such a comparison in this case, because I fear I might be flogged, or crucified, or something worse. But nonetheless, she was losing a lot of blood.
So Amy decided to check it out, she was pretty sure she knew what was causing the bleeding, but needed to confirm and then fix it. Now what comes next might frighten small children or make grown men blush, I don't fully know what the heck any of it means or if I'm using the correct words or even spelling things correctly, but here goes.
She was bleeding a lot!
placenta, uterus, cervix, membranes, bleeding
They fixed it!
And then all was well in the village, and the angels sang and the peasants rejoiced.

Something about a DNC without any anesthesia...apparently the anesthesiologist wouldn't put her under since she had just eaten a cheeseburger immediately after giving birth...just try not to think about the placenta that had just been in the room.  But they had to get all the leftovers outta her so they did a bedside DNC with just some demerol for the pain. Everybody who knows anything about that procedure has bowed down at the feet of Brittney for being able to undergo that without being put under. Apparently it's a horrible procedure that should have had her screaming and donkey-kicking people in the face, but she took it like a champ...she was like "hey hurry up with that crap so I can get that daiquiri they promised me!"  Poor thing she misheard when somebody said something about diapering Courtney....to this day she has yet to have that daiquiri that brought her through the pain so effortlessly.

So the procedure was a success...they stopped the bleeding but then the told us about her hobgoblins being depleted so she was going to have to stay an extra day in the hospital. Remember that part in the last story about my beautiful wife being quite thrifty...yeah all that stuff that just happened was totally freaking her out...all she heard was "blah, blah, blah, this is gonna be expensive."  The anesthesiologist was in the room monitoring the procedure and kept offering to give her a little somethin somethin for the pain but she kept refusing, finally he told her it was on the house so she just let him have her way with her...wait that doesn't sound right. He let him shoot her up....uhh, she let him slip her something to make it all go away....Crap I don't know how to word that so that my wife doesn't sound like a junkie...especially after seeing her arms. The Dr. gave her some pain killers...there, that's better.

So they finally got everything fixed and sent us into a postpartum room and let us have our baby. Of course I've left out the part where everybody who had come to visit came in and held the baby and took more pictures than a bus load of Japanese tourists who just spotted Kelsey Grammer. (True story I heard just this Tuesday)

There's a whole lot of details that I'm skipping over, because, frankly they just aren't that funny or terribly important.  I will say that we had a few very good friends and amazing family members come by and visit and my parents were awesome for taking care of our 18-month-old little angel.

Oh my gosh, how can you not love that little girl????? She's such a cutie pie!

Thursday passed and her hobgoblins were still dropping so when Friday rolled around that told us she needed some blood. That's right, just like Blade III or Twilight Rising Moon, or whatever that crap is, my wife is a vampire.  She had to have more blood or she was going to die! You should have seen her eyes when they said transfusion...it was creepy. It frightens me that my wife who hates "procedures" and has never wanted a "procedure" in her life was quite alright when they started talking about giving her some blood. I tried to bring some logic into the mix and suggest we get some more facts and make a well educated decision regarding the "procedure" especially after her Nanny had complications associated with a transfusion many years ago. But she wouldn't listen, she was consumed with a bloodlust. She just had to have it.  She was able to disfigure herself somehow and change her appearance...I mean not like completely changed like she morphed into a puma or anything like that...it was more like she changed colors kinda like a chameleon  but maybe not quite so drastic a change as a chameleon might make. But her face was a bit colorless nonetheless. Another sign that was a dead giveaway was the fact that vampires and silver don't mix. You see, when she came into the hospital she removed her wedding ring, which isn't exactly silver, it's white gold which is practically the same thing as silver...I mean after all they are the same color and they're metal and everything. So she transformed her appearance and she "suddenly" needed to take off her silver colored jewelry, and she made several negative comments regarding the cross hanging in her room, not to mention her consuming 2 units of blood. So I ask you...if not a vampire, then what is she?

Not that it bothers me at all, vampires are kinds cool. I just thought you all should be aware.

So once the transfusion got did, she was good to go. Her hobgoblins perked up and the sent us out into the not so cold, hard world.

And so it begins............

Just a little recap....Incredible Hulk > Superman > Hulk> Wonder Woman> Hulk> Nicholas Sparks Heroine> Snow White> Wonder Woman> Nicholas Sparks Heroine> Old Mother Hubbard> Vampire > Mother of the Year...i think that about covers the birthing experience